A 300mm wafer on display at the booth of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company during the 2023 World Semiconductor Conference at Nanjing International Expo Center on July 19, 2023, in Nanjing, China.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Asian chip stocks rallied in early trading Thursday after American AI chip darling Nvidia beat Wall Street expectations and issued stronger-than-expected guidance for the fourth quarter.
South Korea’s SK Hynix rallied around 4%. The memory chip maker is Nvidia’s top supplier of high-bandwidth memory used in AI applications.
Samsung Electronics, which also supplies Nvidia with memory, was also up nearly 4%. The company has been working to catch up to SK Hynix in high-bandwidth memory to land more contracts with Nvidia.
In Tokyo, Renesas Electronics, a key Nvidia supplier, was trading up about 4%. Tokyo Electron, which provides essential chipmaking equipment to foundries that manufacture Nvidia’s chips, was trading up 5.87%. Another Japanese chip equipment maker, Lasertec, was up about 6%.
Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank skyrocketed nearly 7%, though the firm recently offloaded its shares of Nvidia. Softbank owns the majority of British semiconductor company Arm, which supplies Nvidia with chip architecture and designs.
SoftBank is also involved in a number of AI ventures that use Nvidia’s technology, including the $500 billion Stargate project for data centers in the U.S.
Nvidia’s sales and outlook are closely watched by the technology industry as a sign of the health of the AI boom, and its strong earnings could ease recent fears regarding an AI bubble.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told investors on an earnings call. “From our vantage point, we see something very different.”